Wearing a lanyard makes navigating the rides soooo much easier, as you don’t have to fumble to pull out park tickets and/or your Express Pass every time you board a ride or the Hogwarts Express! You can also store other cards in it if you’d like.

They sell Lanyards at the parks, BUT you can get them cheaper and have them ready ahead of time if you buy them on Amazon.

TIP 3: BRING YOUR SUNGLASSES!!!!! and for extra fun pix, wear the reflective kind, so you can take cool pictures of the sights in the reflection of your glasses!!!

I am SO taking a pic of myself with the Volcano at Volcano Bay in the reflection of my glasses next time!

TIP 4: If you are prone to burning, bring Sunscreen

I LOVE these little travel-sized ones that can go in your carry-on and are TSA approved sizes.

TIP 5: BRING A WATER BOTTLE WITH YOU ON THE PLANE AND INTO THE PARK, so you can refill it at the water fountains and stay hydrated (as well as staying hydrated on the plane, because planes are very dry)…you can store it in your little backpack (see Tip 6).

If there is a decent chance of rain in the forecast, and you already have thin rain ponchos at home (ones that would fit in your little backpack), consider bringing them, so you’re not stuck buying overpriced ones at the park during a storm. Plus, they are great for wearing on the water rides.

on ETSY, you can find some amazing Harry Potter jewelry, shirts, etc….they even make adorable Gryffindor “Mickey Ears” that are perfect for a park so close to Disney World!

If you are prone to motion sickness, FORGET Dramamine, which makes you sleepy, try SEA-BANDS, all natural accupressure nausea relief bands. I use them for Jimmy Fallon’s ride, the Minions ride, Simpson’s ride and Forbidden Journey rides. Everyone’s different, but those are the only rides that I need them on.

Volcano Bay does NOT provide Towels! I just bring a towel from my hotel’s pool to Volcano Bay, but if for some reason this is not possible, you might want to consider packing towels for Volcano Bay.

I’ll probably think of more later, and have to update this blog…

I HOPE that this list was helpful for you, and please leave a comment if you have ANY other questions, and most importantly ENJOY YOUR TRIP!!!!! YAY!!!!!!! 🙂

Colonial Williamsburg has some BEAUTIFUL Christmas decorations made from all natural items and Christmas Town in Busch Gardens is just super Christmas fun! Loved the Scrooged play there!

Some of these are from the Colonial section, and they are made from all natural leaves, pinecones and other things that one might be able to find in their backyard.

In the Colonial section…Magnolia leaves. Love how this can be made from things you can find in your yard!!!!

The fancier decorations,, with extra things like ribbons and such, are from Storefronts at Colonial Williamsburg’s Merchants Square.

Storefront at the Market…this is not the Colonial section, so a little more fancy.Storefront at the MarketStorefront at the MarketWith Fall being late this year, the contrast of gorgeous autumn foliage and this Christmas tree in Colonial Williamsburg’s Merchants Square was magical!Beautiful all natural decorations

My favorite natural decoration is below. One day I’m going to make this….

This is my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE beautiful all natural decorationLOVE the use of fresh fruit for decoration at Colonial Williamsburg 🙂LOVE the all natural decorations at Colonial Williamsburg 🙂

Back to the store fronts:

This is in the British section of Busch Gardens at Christmas Town! If you are interested in going to Busch Gardens Christmas town and want to see and learn more about what it is like, and see a lot more of the decorations and lights, check out my awesome video! (click here)

you see this tree pretty much as soon as you walk into the park 🙂Decor on the “Family” bathroom 🙂Heading into the Ireland section of the park, one of my fave’sThis is leaving New France, heading towards GermanyBack in IrelandDas Festhaus in Oktoberfest section!I”m 99% sure that this is in Ireland 😉The big gorgeous tree in front of Das Festhaus!!!! it has a musical, magical light show!!!!!France! lots of yummy crepes and wine in this section 🙂This is the North Pole! Where Santa is hanging out….watch out for looooong lines—sheesh!If you want to see more, check out my awesome video here!: https://youtu.be/JE2yYx3JdT4

…if you don’t have any of your own, borrow some! Be the bestest Aunt or Uncle alive!!!

…and they FORCE you to ride the Hulk and other fun stuff like that…

…they also enjoy all the small details of the place 🙂 and seeing their joy is priceless

AND, if they’re under 56″ tall, you can join them (one adult per kid under 56″) on Pterandon Flyers and see super cool sights like these from above!!!!!

Skull Island, Reign of KONG…I took this while riding Pterandon flyers with my nephew (note: you’re not really supposed to take pix from up there, but….)Super fun play area in Jurassic Park that is best enjoyed with the little ones

RANDOM TIP # 2: Head from Universal to Islands of Adventure during the sunset….soooo pretty!

Absolutely EVERYTHING at Toothsome Chocolate Factory is DELICIOUS, even the Brussels Sprouts!!!! …AND if anyone in your party has a peanut (or other allergy) the chef comes to visit your table to discuss your options and it certainly feels good to know that he’s aware of the allergy! it STAYS PACKED here, though, and always on a wait. The best time to come is right when they open. if it’s just one or two people, try sitting at the bar and eating.

yes…the above picture deserves posting twice 🙂

RANDOM TIP #3: DO THE RAPTOR ENCOUNTER! It’s so cool and well worth the wait…and you can watch the raptor attack children while you wait, which is very entertaining! The “trainer” is hilarious, AND if you hand them your phone they will take video AND pix for you!!!

By the way, I challenge you to come up with a better pose than this 😉

RANDOM TIP #4: RIDE THE MUMMY!

WHAT a FUN roller coaster!!!!! its so cool how it gives you little breaks and scary interactions in between the screaming fast roller coaster! Even my 7 year old nephew loved it. Also, the line is usually super short (a hidden gem?) and I didn’t know it at the time that this picture was taken, BUT NOW I know that after you are in the room where there’s fire-literally- on the ceiling, then you go down a drop, that’s where the pic is taken -to your right…so you can pose for it!

RANDOM TIP #5: Buy some reflective sunglasses. I mean, you’re in Florida, you NEED sunglasses….then you can take much cooler pix than this one that I took while waiting in line for the Flight of the Hippogriff (….the kids LOVE this ride, so be prepared to ride it like 26,397 times!!!!)

RANDOM TIP #6: STAY AT THE HARD ROCK HOTEL! The Hard Rock Hotel is one of the 3 hotels that gives every member of the family Unlimited Express Passes for their entire stay (including the day that you arrive, and the day that you leave). Those suckers are worth $89 per person per day. It’s worth it. period. THEN you can spend the day RIDING RIDES versus WAITING IN LINES!!!!

The pool is super awesome, has a fun slide, AND has speakers under water so you can hear music underwater while you swim.Watching a Harry Potter movie at the pool is just one of the many, many, perks!Speaking of perks…for a deposit–that you get back–you can have an electric guitar during your stay!so when your niece becomes a famous musician, she can give you all the credit for getting that guitar and she’ll probably buy you a house to live in when you’re not on tour with her band 🙂the kids LOVE it…..and, dude…you only live once, and those Express passes are GOLD. (side note: my nephew Sebastian wrote this in his cute little 7-year old handwriting and signed his sister’s name…I’m sure she would want ya’ll to know this… )

RANDOM TIP #7: Visit the Knight Bus. Just because….

RANDOM TIP #8: Get the short ones to dial 62442 (M-A-G-I-C …on an old school phone…you know you remember those!) in this phone booth to reach the Ministry of Magic

(Is Sebastian not the CUTEST little Harry Potter EVER?!?!?!??)

RANDOM TIP #8: Get an interactive wand. LOADS of fun (…and sometimes frustration when the little muggles can’t get the spells!). this map comes with it, and if you go to Knockturn Alley you can hold the map under the blacklight at the entrance to illuminate all the spell locations. It’s a blast. trust me.

The blacklight highlights all the spell locations in the area on the right…you can just barely see it in this pic.

While you’re in Knockturn Alley, check out the Vanishing cabinet in Borgen & Burke’s. You can hear what’s inside it!

RANDOM TIP #9:**ALWAYS** buy a “park-to-park” pass so you can ride the Hogwarts Express back and forth from Islands of Adventure to Universal Studios and vice versa…it’s a different ride each way and its just a MUST. If you don’t get this you lose major brownie points and coolness status, just saying….squib.

RANDOM TIP #10: The Hogs Head Pub has beer. This is an important fact. Riding the Flight of the Hippogriff 10,567 times will make you want to visit this establishment.

This is my sister. She needs this place after riding the Forbidden Journey ride 🙂 Look how happy she is.

This is inside the Hogs Head pub. that hog is an Animatronic. super cool. Dragon Scale beer is good.

This is the wizards version of Immodium AD. I’d probably need this if you could ever get me to eat the black pudding they have at the Leaky Cauldron. black pudding! do you know what that is? google it. I.can’t.even.

Get your kids some robes. not Slytherin though. are you sure? yes. anything but Slytherin.Random fun fact: Luna is one of my FAVORITE characters.as a side note, THIS is how a Harry Potter book should look…

YAY~ for GIRL’S weekend!!!! What a wonderful way to reconnect with a lifelong friend. 🙂

FIRST, a couple of tips specific to Volcano Bay:

Stay onsite and get early admission to Volcano Bay in order to ride Krakatau as early as possible before the wait gets too long (~ over 2 hours, but I’ve seen it as long as 545 minutes).

Yes, you CAN use your Tapu Tapu to hold your virtual place in line for Krakatau and most of the other slides BUT you can only wait in onevirtual line at a time. If you are in line for Krakatau and try to tap into another line it gives you the option to cancel your Krakatau place and get in the other line, or just stay in the Krakatau line (or whatever other virtual line you were initially in).

While in virtual line, there are tons of OTHER things to do: the lazy river, the wild river, the wave pool, Runamukka Reef, eat or drink beachy cocktails, take pictures at the Tiki photo spots, or go shopping, or just lay out in the sun and work on your tan.

As of June 2017, the park was not completely finished and had quite a few rough spots to smooth out. The employees didn’t know where all the padded lounger premium seating was, which wasted time and caused food orders to go to the wrong seating creating as much as a one hour wait for food!!! There are many kinks to work out, so I imagine that by late summer/ early fall everything will be running much more smoothly. ALSO, not all slides were open.

You can DEFINITELY enjoy a FULL, ENTIRE day in Volcano Bay, so the NEXT TIME I go, I will plan to stay in Orlando 3 full days, and when I get down there, I will look at the forecast and plan to spend the sunniest, hottest entire day at Volcano Bay and the other two days between Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure.

We had two full days to play at the parks and my work offered a great deal on a 3park 2-day pass, so we took advantage of that.

We stayed at the Royal Pacific Hotel, which is the least expensive on-site hotel that also offers the Unlimited Express Passes for everyone and early admission to the parks. The parks that allow early admission to onsite guests vary, depending on the time of year.

On our trip, Adventure Island and Volcano Bay were open one hour earlier for onsite guests. During Peak Season, I believe ALL parks open 1 hour early for onsite guests.

The park was AMAZING; absolutely gorgeous landscaping, with so much attention to detail and the theming was on point! We also got very lucky weather-wise on Saturday morning; Blue skies and almost warm enough to not freeze to death. I was extremely happy about that, because the forecast was not looking great the entire weekend!

We had reserved premium seating which consisted of a set of padded loungers with a cover, a locker that we could open and close with our Tapu Tapu, and our own server. We shoved some flip flops and clothes in our locker and immediately took off to eat breakfast at Whakawaiwai Eats, which was healthy and delicious, then we rode Krakatau, which, that early had no wait (we didn’t have to use our tapu tapu, but could just get right on in line instead!!!!)

NOTE: if you are vegan or vegetarian, the salad below is a WONDERFULLY DELICIOUS option!!!!

Krakatau was AWESOME- the most fun on a waterslide everrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…the downhills were fun, but the BEST part was how FAST we were launched UPHILL every time. My butt came up off the seat a couple of times when we reached the top of the hill because it popped us up and over so fast!!!

Next we rode Taniwha Tubes which was so incredibly fun, although it didn’t feel like it lasted very long!

Before taking a break, we rode Maku which was SO amazingly exciting as it vaulted up steep sidewalls.

Everywhere you turn in the park, there were amazing details, statues, fun little animals, etc. so after those slides, I wanted to walk around and capture some of the magical theming with my go pro, only to find that it had accidentally turned on during our flight and so the battery was completely dead.

Since we had a 3 park pass, and lots to see, including my beloved Wizarding World, I decided we should go drop the go pro off at the room to charge it, and head to Universal Studios and Diagon alley for lunch and fun rides.

At Universal, we hopped in the singles line of Escape from Gringotts to save time. I recommend doing the regular line once, if you’ve never seen it, but after that It’s best just to ride in the singles line so there’s more time to ride all the tons of other fun rides!!!

Next we rode the Mummy, which is SUCH a SUPER fun, almost hidden, gem. It’s a MUST ride every time I go. Added bonus, the Express line is always super short!!! I’ve never waited more than the time it takes to walk the line plus 2 minutes to ride.

(I cannot say enough how much an Unlimited Express pass is SO WORTH IT- ideally you could stay at the Royal Pacific to get your Express Passes included)….then we rode my FAVORITE roller coaster, the Rock-it, which allows you to pick your own music to listen to during the ride which REALLY makes the ride so super fun.

Next stop; Hogwart’s Express to go to Hogsmeade at Islands of Adventure!

Once there, we rode Forbidden Journey and then it started raining. It rained and rained the entire rest of the night, so we never went back to Volcano Bay that evening. So, sadly, we only spent 2.5 hours at Volcano Bay on Saturday….

Sunday, we decided to take advantage of the early admission to Islands of Adventure and hit Hogsmeade and ride many rides.

Somehow, between Saturday and Sunday, we were able to ride all the following rides, ranked in order from my ABSOLUTE TOP #1 favorite down:

Transformers

Escape from Gringotts

The Mummy

Skull Island, reign of Kong

Spider-Man

Rock-it

Jimmy Fallon’s race through New York.

Harry Potter’s Forbidden Journey

ET

Shrek 4D

Flight of the Hippogriff

The Hulk- albeit fun, this one shortens my life span a little every time 😉

On Sunday, we got to Volcano Bay at about 2 or 3PM and made yet another VB mistake: Krakatau was so fun and our favorite, so we decided to get in the 120 minute virtual line to ride it, versus checking out some of the other many, many slides that we still hadn’t ridden. While in virtual line, we did one lap on the lazy river, and then ordered drinks and food from our premium seating. Unfortunately we sat and waited a full hour for our food, watching our ride time come and go, because our food was sent to the wrong padded loungers!!!! When we finally got our food and finished eating, a cold front had moved in with some sprinkles and it was so cold we didn’t want to get wet at all. I will say, though, that the food (also from Whakawaiwai Eats), was DELICIOUS and healthy.

So, Volcano Bay was awesome although they still had a lot of kinks to work out and the weather did not cooperate with us, AND I wish we would have dedicated an ENTIRE (ideally hot and sunny) day to it. But I can NOT WAIT to go again, it is, without any shadow of a doubt, the BEST water park I have ever been to.

Another absolute FAVORITE food place from the trip was Toothsome’s Chocolate Factory—we ate there twice and didn’t even have dessert because we filled ourselves on DELICIOUS apps, entrees, and their amazing chocolate bread.

This is how silly we were on the plane, btw….

I ALSO *HAVE* to add the following, because it cracks me up so badly!!!!

We are old ladies, just having a silly good old time, and it was our FIRST TIME using a selfie stick, and these pix are hilarious to me!!!! The first pic is practically right after getting off the plane and to the resort:

My “No. 2 & 3 on the list are kind of combined, because one is long term (3 weeks….or longer) and the other happened one night in the middle of the long term one.

FIRST TIME DOING A SCAVENGER HUNT!!!!

This was so much FUN!!!!!!!!!! My husband’s work put together a super fun scavenger hunt downtown, in which we formed teams of ~5-7 people and dressed up in cute little team costumes such as Minions, The Avengers, The Ninja’s, The Griswolds on their way to Walley World (that was us!) and ran/jogged/walked all over a section of downtown Raleigh doing different challenges (on top of the challenge of just trying to *find* the next task!)!

Some of the challenges/tasks included beer pong, running on a treadmill in a swanky apartment building gym, wine tasting, doing a quickie guitar lesson/sing-a-long at a guitar shop, cupcake eating, picture taking, even getting a manicure with the clue painted on one nail, and my favorite; the elimination karaoke challenge!

In the elimination karaoke challenge, 3 people from each of the ~7 teams had to stand on stage; If the mic was in your face, you had to sing a song, basically the only rule was that the song couldn’t be a repeat of one already sung. …oh and you had to sing, no pauses! If you repeated the song, or paused (usually with an “oh shit!”) you were out. Ya’ll this was really fun/funny, I swear! Anyways, we had such a great and persistent team that, even though we walked a lot of the time, we STILL won second place overall!

I highly recommend jumping in on any Scavenger Hunt/Amazing Race type events offered in your town.

NUMBER TWO “FIRST” 😉

Ok, I debated…a lot…whether or not to count this as a “first” on the list. I wouldn’t say it’s an exciting, cool, new thing…and definitely NOT something that I had in mind, at ALL, when brainstorming some of the possible 50 things!!!!

But it sure is a big fat ball of firsts all round up into one!!!!

It’s “The Hormone Reset Diet”

The book JUST came out prior to a group start of >1,000 women who all started this diet together on April 13th.

This diet was a HUGE lifestyle change (for ~21 days) for me.

OK, the premise behind the diet is to “reset” your hormones that impact your metabolism and weight loss, by cutting out certain foods and toxins that impact those hormones every three days. It’s not only that, though. On top of the food changes, and additions (like 1lb of veggies a day, and ensuring 35-40g of fiber a day), there are many new practices that I started doing as a part of this diet…… *AAAANNND* I’ve learned sooooooooooo much about the food industry, hormones, healthy practices, etc.!!!!!

Here’s a quick rundown of the resets and the hormones that they impact:

Reset 1: Meatless and no Alcohol, Hormone: Estrogen

*NOTE: meatless means no red meat ……organic, free-range chicken and pastured eggs, all cold water fish and shellfish ARE allowed.

**ANOTHER NOTE: this reset starts at Day one, AND CONTINUES throughout the 21day reset…same goes with the others. Every three days you drop another hormone-influencing food/toxin, and keep it dropped, throughout the diet.

Re-entry phase: This is where you pick your favorites and add them back, one at a time, three days apart and judge impact and whether or not you should just stay away from them altogether.

There’s sooo much mind-blowing information that I learned about how the above foods influence your hormones…enough to fill a book! So I won’t write a book here, but I can’t tell you ENOUGH how much I recommend this one!!!!

ON TOP of the food changes, I’ve started doing these new things, which seem like small changes but all add up to be some major changes in routines!!!:

Counting how much fiber I consume daily, with a goal of 35g-40g, or more

Learning how to keep my sanity through all these changes with Dr. Sara’s “cell to soul” practices

I also learned that if you eat something for three days in a row that you originally found “meh” (like the morning shakes) it starts to be delicious, and you can’t wait to have it!

After reading the book and each section on WHY you should drop each of the things in the 7 resets, it’s hard not to want to drop EVERYTHING at once.

And many women did. I chose to try to follow the reset when it came to the things I loved, or thought I needed (like caffeine). I’m glad I did, because I noticed a pretty significant drop in my blood sugar when I went off caffeine!!! It’s neat to actually notice the difference that each and every one of these food changes makes!

As of Day 16, I’ve lost 7 pounds! That’s 7 pounds in 16 days! Today is the day that I drop dairy, and—as much as I LOVE cheese (did you know that there are substances in cheese that are like morphine and highly addictive!?!)—I’m excited and interested to see the impact.